COLLEGE FOOTBALL ’92 : A Work of Masonry : It Is Not Yet a Powerhouse, but Kansas Has Been Rebuilt

Running back Maurice Douglas remembers the season of 1988. After all, how do you forget hell on earth?

He remembers the practices in 100-degree Kansas heat. The conditioning drills that featured trash cans strategically placed nearby for easy-access vomiting. The labored strides up a stretch of 14th Street, now known as Mt. Mason.

He remembers wondering if the new Kansas coach, a Woody Hayes disciple named Glen Mason, was trying to kill him or merely cripple him. He remembers watching teammates drop in exhaustion, while others staggered to the locker room, packed their belongings and never returned. Little did they know that, once, Mason nearly quit, too.

Douglas remembers practices so awful that an angry Mason would blow his whistle and start them over again. He remembers the Kansas jokes, the 10 defeats, the sparse crowds in Memorial Stadium, the embarrassment of hearing classmates say, “I can’t wait for basketball to start.”

By season’s end, only 51 scholarship players were on the Jayhawks’ roster. At the time, the NCAA allowed 95. Kansas’ record included a 55-17 loss to Missouri, a 63-24 loss to Oklahoma State, a 63-14 loss to Oklahoma, a 63-10 loss to Nebraska, a 52-21 loss to California and a 56-7 loss to Auburn. So overwhelmed were the Jayhawks by Auburn, in fact, that officials allowed the game clock to run continuously during the second half.

“We were like a Little League team playing against those guys,” Douglas said.

Kansas did win once that year, beating equally pathetic Kansas State, 30-12. Some victory--the game was billed as “the Toilet Bowl.”

“Those were the roughest days of my life,” Douglas said. “But it seems so long ago. Nowadays people are so excited.”

There’s a reason for that. For the first time in 11 years, the Jayhawks won more games last season than they lost. And although a 6-5 record might not sound like much at, say, Alabama or Notre Dame, it is plenty good enough at Kansas, which has not been to a major bowl since 1968, has not had consecutive winning seasons since the mid-1970s and has not been on national television since 1986.

Now there is talk of cracking the upper echelon of the Big Eight Conference standings, somehow nudging Nebraska or Oklahoma or Colorado aside. Even Mason says anything less than a bowl appearance will be a disappointment. Imagine that.

“When did I know that maybe apathy was changing?” Mason asked. “My weekly call-in show. People started to call up complaining to me. First couple of years they’d call in and say, ‘Hey, Coach, hang in there. We don’t care if you win or not. Good effort.’ Now they’re complaining. That’s when I knew we were getting close.

“No way have we totally turned this program around, but we’ve taken it from a loser to a winner,” he said. “When I first got here, if you would have asked me if we could do it in four years, I would have said no.”

And with good reason. For all intents, Bob Valesente, who preceded Mason, and Mike Gottfried, who preceded Valesente, gutted the program by recruiting too many junior college players and too many high school stars with little or no chance of academic success.

“(They) left this thing in a shambles,” said John Hadl, who was born and raised in Lawrence, had his number retired at Kansas, spent 16 seasons in the AFL and NFL, later returned to the Jayhawks as an assistant coach and is now an assistant athletic director in charge of fund-raising.

“The attrition rate was atrocious. They were bringing in kids who couldn’t make it academically. People were coming and going. There were no players. They were gone.”

The program, along with Kansas State’s, was considered the worst in Division I-A. At Kansas, you didn’t follow Jayhawk football as much as you pitied it. Kansas redefined the art of losing.

The Jayhawks have had their moments, but not enough of them. Great players occasionally made their way to Kansas--Gale Sayers, John Riggins and Hadl, for example--but rarely has the school fielded great teams. And good luck finding a Kansas coach who ever stayed longer than nine seasons. There is none.

“There have been a few exemplary highs here,” said Max Falkenstein, who has done Kansas football broadcasts for 40 years. “And there have been lots and lots of lows.”

If you are keeping count--and they are at Kansas--Mason is the school’s 33rd coach in the 102-year history of the program. The basketball program, the picture of success and stability, has had seven coaches.

And if Mason wins only seven more games, he will become the sixth-winningest coach in Kansas history. He would have 21 victories. That wouldn’t be a blip on the Notre Dame radar screen.

“When Glen Mason took the program over four years ago, we were really at the bottom of the barrel,” said Athletic Director Bob Frederick, who hired the 42-year-old coach. “It’s amazing the job that he’s done.”

Actually, it’s amazing that Mason is even at Kansas or, for that matter, that he stayed.

While killing time before the start of a 1987 game between Kansas and Kent State, Frederick was introduced to Mason, then at Kent State. Frederick was immediately impressed by Mason’s enthusiasm--and made a mental note to jot the young assistant’s name down.

That done, Frederick asked the Kent State equipment manager to point out the team’s head coach.

“That’s who you were just talking to,” the man said.

“Oh,” said Frederick, who returned home that night--after Mason’s team beat Kansas--and told his wife, ‘I just met a guy who really has a bright future.’ ”

When it came time to replace Valesente, Frederick remembered Mason. But Mason--who played for Hayes at Ohio State and then served as an assistant coach on his staff, as well as that of Hayes’ successor, Earle Bruce--had other priorities. Bruce was fired by Ohio State after the 1987 season and Mason desperately wanted the Buckeye job. He told Frederick that very thing.

So Frederick went after Bruce. Bruce accepted the offer in principle and Kansas officials made preparations for a news conference, going so far as reserving a large campus meeting room.

But the deal fell apart over money and Bruce eventually took the Colorado State job. Frederick made another run at Mason, who, by that time, knew that John Cooper was the favorite for the job at Ohio State.

But again, Mason said no.

“The next morning I get up--the feminists will love to hear this, I was getting ready to go to work and my wife was getting ready to shovel the drive--and I tell her, ‘I’m fired up. It’s a done deal: I’m not going to Kansas, I’m not going to get the Ohio State job. But I think I have a great team coming back at Kent State. You know, I think I can win every game next year. God, I feel like I’ve got a burden off me. I’m going to work.’ ”

Mason went to work. Shortly after arriving at his office, the phone rang. It was Frederick.

“We talked, he said a few things and I said, ‘You know what, you just hired yourself a new coach.’ ”

Mason called his wife, Sally, and told her to pack her bags. They were going to Kansas.

“You’re nuts,” she said.

And he was. The program was worse than he thought, worse than even Frederick thought.

Three days into his tenure, after realizing that no self-respecting high school recruit was going to visit Kansas, much less sign with the school, Mason made a decision. He was going to call Kent State and ask for his old job back.

Sally’s response? In essence, “You’re nuts.”

So Mason reluctantly stayed. He had a program to rebuild.

“That first year was not coaching, it was survival,” he said. “I never worked a bunch of guys harder in my life.”

Hadl was the receivers’ coach during Mason’s first two seasons at Kansas. He watched in amazement as the Kansas players assembled for the first spring practice of 1988.

“We saw these kids walk out on the field. . . . I mean, they were nice kids, but they were not Big Eight football players,” Hadl said. “I’m thinking, ‘Why did I take this job?’ ”

It was a demanding camp. Players quit. Some even accused Mason of striking them. Mason denied the charges and was quickly cleared of any wrongdoing.

“It wasn’t as bad as Bear Bryant’s deal,” said Hadl, referring to Bryant’s infamous 1954 Texas A&M; training camp at Junction, Tex. “But it was pretty rough.”

The season itself had few memorable moments. There was that victory at Kansas State, where Mason received his first water-cooler shower, and there was a near victory against Baylor, when Bear Coach Grant Teaff asked permission to address the Jayhawk players and staff after the game.

“He had tears in his eyes,” Mason said. “He told them that he couldn’t have been more impressed, that we played with heart. He told my team that they deserved to win. The man spoke with conviction.”

Mason was misty-eyed, too.

“Yeah, I was crying because we lost,” he said.

That was about it for high points. Kansas was so awful that Mason was forced to play many of his freshmen. One day he called the team’s freshman backup center into his office and told him he thought he would make a great nose tackle. The center said he had never played a down of defense in his life. Didn’t matter.

“Three days later he started against Nebraska,” Mason said.

The Jayhawks had one tight end that year. They were so thin at other positions that Mason ran out of emergency plans. The rules said they could take more than 60 players to road games. Kansas could barely put together a traveling squad of 40.

Mason would wake up in the middle of the night, an imaginary conversation with a referee still fresh in his mind.

“I’d tell the official, ‘Hey, you’ve got to give me a timeout and you’ve got to make it a couple of minutes, because I’ve got to figure out what to do here,’ ” Mason said.

The Jayhawks won four games the next year and three games the year after that. Things were getting better. There were signs of hope. Mason started to persuade big-time recruits such as defensive tackle Dana Stubblefield to take a chance on Kansas.

“I’d never heard of it,” said Stubblefield, now a candidate for the Lombardi Award. “All I knew is that they’d won an NCAA championship in basketball. My mother kind of chose where I was going to go. If it would have been my decision, I would have gone to a (Southeastern Conference) school.”

But mother knew best. Now Stubblefield, a senior, wouldn’t trade places with anyone.

“These are the highlight times,” he said. “I’m glad I helped change this into a winning program. I’m glad I stuck it out.”

Stubblefield knew Kansas was getting better two years ago, when the Jayhawks put a chokehold on the Oklahoma offense for most of the game. Coming off of the field, Stubblefield remembered thinking, “We can play with the big guys. We can play with anybody.”

Kansas still lost, but opposing players, armed with compliments, began to seek out the Jayhawks after games. Opposing coaches began to pay more attention to Kansas’ budding defense.

“Now I think it’s our turn to do that, to go up to guys and say, ‘Hey, you played a good game,’ ” Stubblefield said.

A seven-victory season isn’t out of the question for the Jayhawks. The defense is among the Big Eight’s best and the offense has the potential to provide an occasional surprise. ESPN thought enough of Kansas that it put the Jayhawks’ Sept. 24 game against Cal on its schedule.

“It’s a lot better,” Mason said. “In the beginning, us and Kansas State were the laughingstock of the country.”

Not anymore they aren’t. For the first time in years, the Jayhawks are the ones smiling. And in a pleasant change of pace, Sally Mason can’t say they are nuts.